Two Tales of Abercrombie & Fitch

I just read an interesting article in Time Magazine about the failing CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch, Mike Jeffries, who appears to be trying to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

In 2007 the teen stores, with their racy advertising and overpriced crappy clothes was making a profit of $476m. In 2008, this profit dropped to $273m. When the recession hit, they essentially broke even with a profit of around quarter of a million dollars. But in typical CEO style, Mike Jeffries milked the company as much as he could, taking $76m in personal compensation in 2008, just as his failed policies and bad strategies caused same store sales figures to plummet 23%, and stock price to drop 56%. He was also listed as one of highest paid, worst performing CEOs in 2008.

Jeffries not only likes his big fat paychecks, even when he sucks, but he also has a thing for the company jet. His personal travel cost some $1.3m in 2008. Now that the company is hitting some hard times, the board decided to end his love affair with the jet, but in exchange gave him $4m by way of apology.

What I find interesting is the reality that CEOs haven't learned. The recession was, for most of them, just something that happened to the peasants. As the mortgage crisis hit middle America, CEOs like Jeffries were taking multi million dollar bonuses in exchange for curtailing their travel expenses. And in CEO land, if you fuck up, and make bad decisions that cost a company millions of dollars, it doesn't matter. You still make millions of dollars personally. Essentially the price of failure is no different from the price of success. So just fly around on the company jet destroying the company that pays you millions, and then eventually take a golden multi-million dollar handshake and head to the yacht for a vacation.

This kind of corporate stupidity, and greed, is seriously going to bring America to its knees. When you have people completely unconcerned about company profits, putting themselves so far ahead of the employees and the customers, it simply cannot end well.

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After I had read that article I noticed another one from the end of last year that kind of annoyed me.

It seems that some Muslim teen, forced to wear a hijab by her oppressive religion, was turned down for a job at the store allegedly because the hijab is against their dress code (which includes no black clothing and no head covering).

Of course she is suing over the alleged discrimination and will probably end up with some settlement. But this has to be the height of bull shit doesn't it? Abercrombie & Fitch is famous for their dark stores containing massive posters of half naked models (such as the one above). Please explain to me how it is that you can be part of a religion so strict that showing your hair to people is offensive, yet hanging out among half naked sexualized images all day is okay?

I'm all for religious freedom. If people want to worship magic invisible deities, that's up to them (so long as it doesn't hurt others, or involve raping children). But I certainly have a problem with the oppression of women, even if they have been conditioned to 'like' wearing the oppressive garments. We live in a country where most states can fire people for almost any reason, so they should certainly be allowed to make a judgment call when it comes to a hiring decision. Do you really think that Abercrombie would not fire an employee who refused to follow the dress code because of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

If you believe that your god is offended by women showing parts of their face or hair in public, then you cannot tell me that this same god is going to be okay with you standing around in a dimly lit store surrounded by images of naked people, and young teens in skimpy over priced outfits.

This entire lawsuit seems like an elaborate ruse to me. Conservative Muslim teen tries to get a job at of all places Abercrombie and Fitch. Just happens to have a friend who already works there, who just happens to leak that the only reason she wasn't hired was because of her hijab. Okay, sure.